When Fiddlehead Farms had a smaller yield of spinach than expected, farmer Heather Coffey needed a quick solution to update over 150 customer orders with smaller bags of spinach.  Luckily, LFM’s latest software update includes bulk options to help farmers change multiple customer orders with just a few clicks of a button.

“I can see all members who ordered spinach, check a box to select all the orders, and put a new price per bag so everyone could get a smaller bag of spinach instead. LFM’s new features worked like a charm to make sure everyone could get a taste!” -Heather Coffey, Fiddlehead Farm

On pack day, farmers don’t have time to waste—that’s why LFM is making it easy to make bulk order changes with just a few clicks. Watch the video below to see the steps to update products from multiple orders at once!

Ready to save time when it counts? Schedule a demo with Local Food Marketplace.

Here are the changes you can make to multiple your orders at once:

• Apply a Promo Code
• Update Customer Location
• Update Order Period
• Add a Distribution Fee
• Add a Product
• Swap Products
• Credit Products
  

  Bulk Update Options on Local Food Marketplace

Here’s how LFM customers can make these changes:

1. 1. • On the Orders page, new options under the “Bulk Actions” drop down can help you make quick changes to multiple customer orders at once. Changing pick up locations at the last minute? Offering a special discount? Need to add on a different product due to crop failures? Just select the check box for impacted orders, and select an option under “Bulk Actions.”
      • On the Pack Orders page, sort orders by “product.” If you’d like to swap a product, select the double sided arrow.

More Ways to Save Time When Selling Local Food:

• Optimize your pack line! Here’s how one food hub reduce their pack line hours by 40%
• Time is Money: How to Save 20 Hours a Week
• How to Save Time on Producer Payments

The post [New!] Bulk Order Updates to Help You Save Time first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Our goal at Local Food Marketplace is to help support local food ecosystems. Our software solutions are helping farmers, food hubs, and markets sell and distribute local food. When shopping online, language barriers can get in the way of local food access. That’s why, in our next software release, Local Food Marketplace will include language translation through integration with Weglot!

Weglot is a website translation service that makes it easy to accurately translate your Marketplace storefront. We are excited to offer this integration to LFM customers starting with our next software update in mid-February 2023. If you would like to learn more about how LFM can help you business sell local food, reach out today for a product demo!

A Multilingual Storefront Made Easy

Sell Local Food In More Than One Language

With this easy-to-use integration, setting up language translation only takes a few simple steps (with no coding required!). The integration offers automated translation of your customer-facing marketplace, while still giving you full control to review and edit translations. Once it’s all set up, your customers can easily shop for local food in the language(s) you choose to support.

At Local Food Marketplace, we see this integration as an opportunity to increase access to local food. By choosing an ecommerce platform with multilingual options, you will be able to provide local food to a wider percentage of your community. This new feature will not only help to improve the online shopping experience for your customers, but it will also help to increase sales and grow your business.

Multilingual SEO

In addition to improving customer experience, Weglot also offers multilingual SEO, making it easier for your customers to find your site on Google. This will help increase your visibility to customers speaking languages other than English.

A Multilingual Marketplace!

How to Translate your Marketplace with the Weglot Integration

Local Food Marketplace customers can start using this feature with our next software release in mid-February. If this is something you’d like to start using, please reach out to our support team! It’s just a few steps to get started.

There is no additional cost on your LFM invoice to use this integration, however you will need to create an account with Weglot. You can review their plans and pricing page here.

Your Customers Can Toggle Storefront Language with a Single Click.

Once the integration is set up, Weglot is able to automatically translate your storefront. From there, you may choose to edit any translation—you’re in control! Check out Weglot’s site to learn more about how it works: https://weglot.com/

Visitors to your storefront will see an option to toggle between languages. It’s just a click of a button to view a translated page.

..

To learn more about this integration or other ways our software can help you sell local food, schedule a free demo today!

The post New LFM Integration! Translate your Marketplace with Weglot first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

We’re so excited to let you know about new software features to help you manage your customized CSAs, farm shares, and subscriptions!

There are many ways to sell online, but typical e-commerce platforms can’t accommodate the flexibility and variation of local food. Here are just some of the ways that LFM’s subscription software can help you:

Scenario: You’re a looking to offer your customers more selection options in your weekly farm share.

Community supported agriculture is a tried-and-true way for shoppers to support local farms. But someone who’s new to local food might be intimidated by a mystery box full of unfamiliar veggies. When it comes to their grocery list—not every shopper wants a surprise! But with LFM’s “Subscription Builder,” customers can see exactly what’s in this week’s share, and even customize it!

Our software makes it easy for farmers to designate substitution products for shoppers to trade with other items in their farm share. Allergies and preferences are no problem! Plus, shoppers can even tack on “extras” to their weekly share—like that fresh strawberry jam or local honey. Get your customers shopping your whole catalog, and keep growing your sales!

Products sold in subscriptions are tracked in the same way as everything else you sell—that means real-time product availability, pick lists, packing lists, sales reports, and more!

Communicating with farm share members is a snap: send out a weekly “what’s in the box” email straight through LFM! Members can receive their box as is—or customize week-to-week!

Scenario: You’re a food hub manager using farm shares to promote many different producers at once.

Farm shares can be a great way to bundle food from many farmers into one easy-to-order product. But managing these shares can be time consuming. That’s why LFM’s new Subscription Builder features were designed with food hubs in mind.

With Subscription Builder, food hubs can create farm shares directly from items already listed by your farms. Pair products from many different producers to create an exciting and varied farm share! And shoppers can always check the LFM storefront to learn the source of each product.

These products will also auto-populate on pick tickets for producers. Take the guess work out of ordering from producers, and let them know exactly how much to harvest!

Plus, see your average order size grow as your loyal share members check out the site each week to see what veggies to expect—and to tack on some extra treats and value-added items while they’re there!

Is Subscription Builder right for me?

These subscription features are just another way that LFM brings all of your sales channels to one place. From flexibility for customers, to increased sales for you, Local Food Marketplace is truly an all-in-one solution.

Are you a current customer looking to license the Subscriptions module and start using these new features? Please contact us today!

Still searching for a CSA software solution? Meet with us for a free demo!

More Resources to Help Upgrade Your Farm Share Subscriptions:

• • • • Here’s How Local Food Can Join the Subscription Economy
      • Cultivate Customers & Grow Value: A Guide to CSA Retention
      • An Interview with Blue Sky Organic Farms
      • Growing Sales and Sliding Scales: An Interview with Upswing Farm
      • A Farmer’s Guide to Online Orders

The post New Feature – “Subscription Builder” for Farm Shares! first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Join us for a demo to see Marketplace and Connect in action!

Why Did We Build Connect?

We see Connect as the foundation of our vision to grow & scale the local food ecosystem. There is no local food ecosystem without the supply—the farmers that grow the food. Our goal is to help farmers grow without being overtaxed with administrative tasks. The Connect app will open new opportunities to farmers by giving them one place to manage all online and offline sales.

How Can Connect Help Farmers and Producers?

Everything From One Account: The explosive increase in online sales over the past few years has helped more customers access local foods. But if a single farm is selling to two or three different online stores or farmers markets, that can mean two or three different account logins, two or three different platforms to learn, and two or three different inventories to manage. Local Food Connect solves this real-world problem by offering farmers one app where they can manage their sales to all channels, including food hubs currently using LFM and even in-person transactions at farm stands and markets.

• Manage Inventory: Avoid overselling products or miscounting inventory by having one place to view and manage your total inventory, while also having the option to break it down by each store. 
• Create Consolidated Harvest Lists: Be ready for harvest days by using Connect to print clear harvest checklists or keep track on your mobile device, assign tasks to different harvest crews, and even print packing labels. Connect will do the work without the complicated spreadsheets.

Stay Organized & Plan: To know how much food to grow, where to focus sales, or just to plan for the season ahead, farmers need good data. Rather than running sales reports from several different sources and having to manually combine information, use Connect to access all of your data in one place.

• Integrated information: Use the app to get a quick glance on what’s coming up for the week, what you’ve sold, and what you’re low on.
• Simplify Reporting: Spend less time juggling spreadsheets, and more time growing your business. Connect provides report templates to get you started, but all your reports can be fully customized.

Get Paid Faster: The last thing a producer should spend time on is chasing down payments. Connect can help you get paid faster and easier than ever.

• Automation: Food hubs and markets that use LFM will be able to automate payments to their producers through Connect.
• Take Payments: Connect integrates with Square terminals to process payments in-person at farms and farmers markets.

User Friendly: Local Food Connect was designed to be easy and accessible.

• Mobile First: Connect is formatted for phones and tablets, so you can use the app on the farm, at the market, and on the go!
• Easy product mapping: Does one site sell your products as “Apples, Green” while your own inventory lists them “green apples”? Connect can automatically map these product names so you can have a more accurate idea of your sales and inventory.

How Can Connect Help Food Hubs and Online Markets?

We believe that the new Connect app will also help current subscribers to our Local Food Marketplace, by helping you better connect to producers you work with.

Payments: Pay your producers directly through Connect (available in Spring 2022). Save time on billing and keep track of payments in one place.

Easier for producers: Producers are experiencing platform fatigue with too many systems to learn. Connect’s simple, mobile-first design offers a fast and easy way for producers to update products they list on your marketplace, create harvest lists, pack lists and more! 

It’s free for producers to get started using Connect with your LFM site.

The post Announcing: Local Food Connect first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

So why should farmers bring together their online and offline sales? Here are a few critical reasons:

Better Customer Experience

• • Increased profits
    • By offering different sales channels, you can increase your customer reach. Many customers may prefer ordering online vs at your farmstand, store, or farmers market, and even the other way around.
  • Better customer experience & information
    • An integrated system provides a better customer experience – for example, customers can use account credits while shopping at your farmstand the same way they can use them online.
    • Regardless of where a customer makes their purchase with your farm, with the LFM system you can access complete customer purchasing and transaction history.

Better Data for Business Decisions

• • Up to date inventory – always!
    • Integrating all sales enables farms to have better inventory and information on what products are selling where.  Many farms find it challenging to track their product sales at farmers markets and farmstands and hence don’t have accurate data to make decisions.  Pulling that information into the same system used for online sales provides better information for decision making.
  • Valuable sales information at your fingertips
    • Where do you sell the most? What sells the best and where?
    • Using the LFM platform you can easily and quickly pull the data you need to make better business decisions at no additional cost!

Consolidated Reporting

• • No more tedious spreadsheets!
    • By integrating your online and offline sales with a platform like LFM, you can eliminate costly human errors and time consuming data entry.
  • Your entire farm can work from the same information.
    • From harvest team to pack team to the sales team, LFM utilizes specific users, reports, and features to maximize the information shared with your essential team members.
  • All your revenue in one place.
    • The key to successfully increasing profits is being able to monitor your revenue and margins all in one place. A cohesive revenue report that reflects your omnichannel sales is a direct way to a better business.
    • At LFM we offer robust, comprehensive reporting to all of our customers with no strings attached. We believe your data is yours, and it is essential for increasing your bottom line.

Marketing Integration

• • Use the data to send targeted messages
    • LFM now offers Mailchimp Integration to streamline your marketing! Quickly and easily compose targeted email campaigns to your customers based on data like first and last order dates, subscriptions, and more.
    • Create custom shopping lists and featured product lists that link directly to your storefront to embed directly in your Mailchimp emails.
    • Other popular examples of targeted messaging:
      • Send pre-order reminders to farmers market attendees.
      • Send event invitations and pickup reminders to CSA members
      • Send wholesale availability to restaurants, etc.

What are the real world examples?

• • Market style CSAs and shares. Accessing a customer’s account from the farmers market and adjusting for the items they’ve purchased on the fly allows you to track in detail how the customer has used their market style CSA and ensure accurate account details.
  • Customer pre-orders and pays at pickup.
  • Customer has account credit and wants to use it at the farmstand.
  • Farm wants to analyze top selling products for each farmers market.
  • Farm has limited products available and wants to offer them online and offline, without having to remember to update inventory.
  • Food hub has a store or stand and needs to track consigned inventory in store.

What is needed?

• • An easy-to-use customer interface for ordering online
  • An easy-to-use POS system for updating inventory live from the farmers market
  • A robust inventory management system

LFM offers all of these and more to deliver true omni-channel sales.

• • Customer Types & Price Levels
  • Square POS Integration
  • Mailchimp Integration with custom, embeddable featured products and shopping lists directly linked to the storefront
  • Inventory Management
  • Subscription and Membership features
  • Recurring Orders
  • Multiple ordering periods for custom distribution management and logistics optimization
  • Pick up and Delivery locations to coordinate online sales and in person distribution
  • Easy to use order interface for updating online orders with offline sales
  • Robust product setup to customize how and what you sell
  • …and so much more!

The post Boost Your Bottom Line: Integrating Online & Offline Sales for Farmers first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

You may have noticed a fresh, new look when it comes to Local Food Marketplace! Since our inception in 2009, our humble tomato logo has seen us through our development from a local, direct-to-consumer sales platform to the comprehensive sales and distribution platform it is today. Now, we support nearly 350 food hubs and fresh food markets, and more than 12,000 producers, in the United States and Canada.

Through all of this growth, we’ve made the decision to retire our tomato logo in favor of an inspiring new look. This milestone is a major move for us and the first in many new, exciting things to come to the LFM platform! While our look has been refreshed, we remain true to our original mission. We will continue to be a different kind of tech company – one that seeks to provide a vehicle for success for farmers, local food entrepreneurs, and businesses – enabling them to be more profitable without giving up their brand identity, relationships, or data.

The way consumers purchase food and the way producers sell food has changed dramatically over the last 12 years, and we have continually evolved and grown to anticipate the needs of our customers. This new look represents our role and vision of connecting producers and markets within the local food system by enabling new relationships and opportunities.   

This brand update is also in anticipation of several transformational projects and collaborations that will be announced in the coming months!  

We are excited to create a more connected local food system that maintains the independence of producers and hubs while offering opportunities to expand sales opportunities. Stay tuned for updates on upcoming projects!

The post Introducing a Brand Makeover for Local Food Marketplace first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Despite this boom, many tech companies fail to support their producers and customers. Instead, many platforms want to “disrupt” the market to increase their revenue while leaving their farmers with inaccessible data and a lack of support.

The way we buy and sell food has changed dramatically, but since 2009, Local Food Marketplace has “been working behind the scenes to help farmers grow their sales by making local food easier to find and purchase in their own communities”. In an industry that prides itself on “disrupting” the market, we’ve prided ourselves on taking a much different approach – inclusiveness.

Recently, LFM CEO and Co-Founder, Amy McCann, had the opportunity to speak with the North American Food Systems Network. Recognized as a food systems innovator, Amy explains how and why the Local Food Marketplace platform is different than all of the other local food platforms.

Read how Amy McCann, CEO of LFM, is simultaneously leading the charge while taking the path less travelled.

The post Who We Are: A Different Kind of Tech Company first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

According to the Houston Chronicle, “Approximately 97 percent of businesses are using email marketing to try to convert email recipients into buyers. It must be working because, according to a Smith-Harmon survey, 76 percent of subscribers have made purchases from an email marketing message.”

Robust Contact Data & Syncing

As with all LFM features, our Mailchimp Integration is far more than a data dump. Not only do you get contact information from your LFM account, it also includes other custom fields that we track in our database that are crucial for targeted marketing purposes! When we say it’s not just a data dump, we mean it. Once you sync your LFM account with your Mailchimp account, you can easily create and manage contacts and associated data with the specific contacts to make it as useful as possible. Quickly and efficiently create tags, segments, and groups in Mailchimp using LFM contact data like first and last order dates, active vs inactive CSA subscribers, delivery routes, locations, customer types, and so much more! Additionally, you can see customer’s Mailchimp open rates directly from their LFM profile, for even more granular marketing data.

Our Mailchimp integration opens up a streamlined approach to your LFM marketing. Here are some impactful ways to utilize the feature:

• • Welcome New Subscribers: you can easily setup Mailchimp automations and journeys to send automated e-mail campaigns for new subscribers to your newsletter and your new customers.
  • Ordering Open alerts: send scheduled Mailchimp emails to your customers for when ordering windows open. You can use the contact data from our integration to tag contacts and create segments for effortless shopping campaigns.
  • Weekly Specials: create embeddable content for featured products and custom shopping lists to include in your weekly email campaigns. Keep your customers engaged and excited for new products or sales!
  • Win-Back Campaigns: want to contact customers who have never ordered or haven’t ordered in 6+ months? Now that you can easily sort and organize lost customers, you can create specific Mailchimp campaigns to re-engage those customers. According to marketing firm Randall Reilly, “A lost customer or a lead that has fallen through still holds significant value. Because you have a 20 – 40% chance of selling to lost customers, compared to a 5 – 20% chance of selling to new prospects…”

Looking for more strategies? Check out our complete Email Marketing Toolkit.

Embeddable Custom Shopping Lists & Featured Products

The LFM & Mailchimp Integration is not just a streamlined contact data sync, we also offer embeddable custom product shopping lists and featured products meant for your Mailchimp campaign content! Now you can directly market specific products to specific customer groups with beautiful newsletter content that clicks through right to your online LFM storefront.

Additional Marketing Resources

Consistent, quality marketing is essential for successful businesses, especially online markets. Our new Mailchimp Integration provides a streamlined, in-depth customer database for you to promote your marketplace. If you’re looking for more information on how to increase sales and marketing for farms, foodhubs, farmers markets, and CSAs, check out our recent blog posts:

• • How Quality Photos Drive Sales
  • Social Media Strategies to Maximize your Online Store
  • How to use Press Releases to Promote your Online Store

Keep an eye out for more new features and marketing tips on the blog from LFM! 

*Resources: 
Boykin, Theresa. “5 Ways to Win Back Lost Customers.” Randall Reilly, 2020, https://www.randallreilly.com/5-ways-to-win-back-lost-customers/
Lorette, Kristie. “The Effect of Email Marketing on Consumer Behaviour.” The Houston Chronicle, https://smallbusiness.chron.com/email-marketing-pitfalls-42956.html

The post LFM & Mailchimp: New Integration for Powerful Marketing first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Online sales through Local Food Marketplace increase your products’ accessibility, offer convenience to your customers, and develop key marketing touch points that you otherwise would not have – but you need to harness these opportunities to get the most out of them.

We teamed up with Taste the Local Difference (TLD) for a four-part series focused on quick, easy, and impactful marketing resources for farmers, food hubs, and markets! Taste the Local Difference specializes in marketing local food and to help amplify their efforts. TLD represents thousands of local food businesses across the value chain, and they all have one thing in common: limited time and resources.

Part 3: Use Pictures Worth Clicking

At the farmers market we can taste the peppery bite of an arugula leaf, smell the aroma of freshly baked bread, test the ripeness of a peach with a gentle squeeze, and hear—often directly from the producer—the story of how their food was grown or made. We shop with our senses, and when we shop online those senses are limited. When you can’t rely on a free sample or a friendly chat to make the sale, product photos are the next best thing. Quality images reach through the screen and spark a sensory response, helping your customers imagine just how good your products taste, smell, and feel.

In Part 2 of our TLD series, we discussed social media strategies to maximize your online store. An impactful practice for your online store and social media is the use of high quality, clear images to highlight your product and marketplace. Social media is an excellent tool for driving traffic to your online store, too! Now that you have the traffic, how do you convert this to sales?

Use these tips and tools to represent your brand online with high-impact photos that help drive sales.

Add an image for every product

Online items without a photo are usually matched with a logo, low-quality stock image, or just a blank space. These placeholders look generic and skippable, and do nothing to entice customers. Great photos capture customers’ attention and help differentiate your products. While it’s tempting to assume that customers know what they want and don’t need photos to help them shop (Everyone has seen a carrot. Do I really need to add a picture?), remember that in an online marketplace your pictures are your packaging. Think about how much goes into making products stand out on grocery store shelves or farmers market displays. Well-styled, high-quality images are the key to standing out online.

Customize your product photos

One way to quickly build a customized image library is to hire a photographer. For about $300/hour an experienced food photographer will capture images of your products styled in ways that emphasize your brand. Share inspiration photos, branding guidelines, or key words (e.g., fresh-picked, handmade, heirloom) to help the photographer understand as much as possible about your business and your vision for the photos. Ask for links to their portfolio and published work to get a sense of their style.

If the $300/hour rate feels out of reach, consider organizing a full day shoot for multiple vendors. The photographer may offer a day rate (which is often a better deal than an hourly rate), and you can offer time slots for other local businesses to sign up and get their products professionally photographed. Charge a fee for each participating business and use those funds to cover your costs.

Another added benefit for having professional photographs of your products and vendors is the ability to reuse these photos for different purposes. In part 1 of our TLD series, we discussed how to use press releases to promote your online store. News outlets love a good photo opportunity, so providing a professional, licensed photograph with your press release is a sure fire way to get your story out there.

If you’re using a stock photo, make it a good one

If paying a photographer is out of reach or you need high-quality placeholders while you’re waiting on a photoshoot, browse an image bank. Unsplash offers thousands of high resolution photos contributed by photographers all over the world. Their photos are free to download and use to market your business. When searching for images, keep in mind that effective product photos have:

• Good variation in color
• Aren’t too busy or cluttered
• Make it clear what the product is

Taste the Local Difference offers a library of high quality photos

In a large image bank it can take some digging and a critical eye to find appropriate photos to represent your products. And if you’re selling unique produce varieties, you might be out of luck. A search for “purple carrot” in Unsplash yields plenty of photos, but only 3 feature the root vegetable. The Taste the Local Difference image library comprises over 75 high-quality photos shot specifically for use in Local Food Marketplace. For $100 you can access the full image catalog and set high-quality photos as the default image for your fruit and vegetable products.

We hope these tools and tips empower you to choose the best images to represent your brand and help you build a more beautiful online store!

Let us know how it goes, and keep an eye out for more marketing tips on the blog from TLD! You can gain access to 1:1 support and customized marketing strategies from Taste the Local Difference here.

The post How Quality Photos Drive Sales first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

• How many customers purchased just once, never to place an order again and how does that compare to previous years?
• What was the average order frequency, compared to previous years? Meaning, how often did customers place an order? We recommend calculating this in terms of weeks and to look at order frequency for all customers, as well as repeat buyer order frequency.
• What is your average order size, compared to previous years?

We analyzed the data in aggregate for all LFM customers using our platform in 2019 and 2020 to see how they fared. Please note this is aggregate data across markets in 45 states, 6 Canadian Provinces, and 5,200 farms – selling into multiple channels – wholesale, retail, and direct to consumer.

Here is what we found:

Average order size: 1.4% decrease ($132.80 in 2019 vs $131.02 in 2020)
Order frequency for all customers: Reduced by 2 weeks
Repeat buyer order frequency: Reduced by 0.5 weeks
One-time buyers: 6% increase
Sales growth: 50.1% increase
Number of buyers: 131% increase

Our aggregate analysis:

With the significant shift to direct-to-consumer sales, we expected order frequency to shift down and the number of one-time buyers to increase. Because the data includes wholesale and retail orders together, it is not a perfect comparison, but the results are stronger than we expected. The main takeaway being that, in aggregate, LFM customers seem to be attracting a similar buyer profile between 2019 and 2020 and the pandemic provided an opportunity to attract new buyers at a faster rate than they would normally.

Although you may reach different conclusions based on your own sales and unique circumstances, there are some important takeaways:

• Retention may have decreased, but – depending on the way you measure it – it may not be as significant as you think.
• It is much more achievable (and less costly) to focus on increasing the order frequency (or order size) for those that already buy from you. If LFM customers can match the 2019 order frequency with the same number of 2020 repeat buyers in 2021, they stand to grow 35% in 2021…without adding a single new customer.
• Increasing average order size can be the easiest.

In marketing terms, Average Order Size, Average Purchase Frequency and Retention Period make up Lifetime Customer Value, which offer a more accurate picture of profitability and long-term success than purely retention. Local Food Marketplace provides in-depth reporting and exportable data to make it easy for you to access all of this information and more. Depending on what part of the equation you see the best opportunity for your business, here are some suggestions:

Average Order Size:

• Freshen up your storefront regularly so customers see new, featured items.
• Communicate – through all of your channels – email, social media, etc. to highlight products, offer recipes, and more.
• Curate your storefront. Decision fatigue is real. Depending on your buyer profile, 50-100 highly curated items often results in higher order sizes than offering hundreds of products.
• Expand your offerings. If you offer a narrow range of items, offering products in several categories will help increase order size.
• Ensure you have adequate supply of popular items.

Increase Purchase Frequency:

• Subscriptions and standing orders make it easy for busy customers to ensure they get an order from you regularly.
• Communicate – again, regular, consistent communication is key to ensure customers order from you. They need reminders to order and usually more than one, and reminders to confirm abandoned carts.

Measure & Adjust:

• Depending on the areas you decide to focus on, don’t wait to measure your results at the end of 2021. This will enable you to tweak your approach and test out different ideas. We recommend a simple monthly report showing metrics related to your goals.
• Making small adjustments over time will make it easier to course correct and know when something new is working.

Although we are in a time of lots of unknowns, farms and markets as a whole should trust in the brand they’ve built that has attracted these new customers. Take time to analyze the data and focus on customer lifetime value rather than just retention. When you are selling online or using a software platform, it is essential to be able to access and utilize your data for such analysis. Local Food Marketplace provides in-depth reporting features and fully exportable data, so that you can easily and accurately grow your business.

The post Worried about Customer Retention? Focus on this. first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.